Robin Morgan
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Robin Morgan (b. January 29, 1941) is a former child actor turned American radical feminist activist, writer, poet, and editor of Sisterhood is Powerful and Ms. Magazine.
During the 1960s, she participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements; in the late 1960s she was a founding member of radical feminist organizations such as New York Radical Women and W.I.T.C.H.. She also founded the Women's Media Center (see[1])
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[edit] Child Star
Morgan was born in Lake Worth, Florida and grew up in Mount Vernon, New York. She began her career as a child star at the age of 2, when her mother and her Aunt Sally put her in child modeling. At the age of four she had her own radio program, Little Robin Morgan, and her most famous role came at the age of nine, when she began to play Dagmar Hansen, the younger sister in the 1950s TV series Mama which starred Peggy Wood.
When the show ended in 1956, Morgan was suffering from the pressures of unwanted fame, and resolved to become a poet rather than an actor. She fought her mother's efforts to make her continue acting, attended Columbia University and then took jobs as a literary agent and freelance editor in New York City after her graduation.
[edit] Activism and Writing
Morgan began publishing her poetry in the early 1960s (later collected in her 1972 anthology, Monster). In 1962, she married the poet Kenneth Pitchford. She soon became active in the anti-war Left, and contributed articles and poetry to Left-wing and counter-culture journals such as Liberation, Rat, Win, and The Guardian.
In the late 1960s, Morgan was a member of the Youth International Party with Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. However, tensions over sexism within YIP (and the New Left broadly) came to a head while Morgan was becoming more involved in Women's Liberation activism. In 1968, she joined demonstrations to free Valerie Solanas (protesting the three-year sentence Solanas received for attempted murder against Andy Warhol), and became a founding member of New York Radical Women, helping to organize their inaugural protest of the Miss America pageant in September 1968.
Later in the same year she helped to create W.I.T.C.H., a radical feminist group that used public street theater (called "hexes" or "zaps") to call attention to sexism. In December 1968, Morgan and other women staged a "hex" against both House Unamerican Activities Committee and the Chicago Eight; they argued that men in HUAC and the Chicago Eight played off of each other to portray the antiwar movement as the pet project of a few male "stars".
Like many radical feminists, Morgan made a decisive break from what they described as the "male Left," and put the reasons for her break into her 1970 essay for the first women's issue of Rat, "Goodbye to All That". In the same year, she edited one of the first anthologies of radical feminist writings, Sisterhood is Powerful.
Since the 1970s, Morgan has continued in her writing, editing, publishing, and feminist organizing. In addition to her poetry and frequent articles on feminist topics, she has edited two anthologies following up on Sisterhood is Powerful: Sisterhood is Global (1984) and Sisterhood is Forever (2003). She has served as a contributing editor to Ms. Magazine for many years, and served as editor-in-chief from 1989-1993.
Robin Morgan currently lives in New York City. Her son (with Kenneth Pitchford) is the musician and recording artist Blake Morgan.
[edit] Publications
- The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, Washington Square Press; (December 2001) ISBN 0-7434-5293-3
- The Anatomy of Freedom
- The Mer-Child: A New Legend for Children and Other Adults
- "Upstairs in the Garden: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1988", W. W. Norton, 1991, ISBN 0-393-30760-3
- A Hot January: Poems 1996-1999
- Saturday's Child: A Memoir, W. W. Norton, 2000, ISBN 0-393-05015-7
- Front Line Feminism, 1975-1995: Essays from Sojourner's First 20 Years
- "Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist", Random House; 1978, ISBN 0-394-72612-X
- Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement
- Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology
- Sisterhood is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, Washington Square Press; (March 5, 2003), ISBN 0-7434-6627-6
- The Burning Time, Melville House; (March 1, 2006), ISBN 193363300X
- Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right, Nation Books; (September 28, 2006), ISBN 1-56025-948-5
[edit] Quotes
Men "stow their brains in their crotches. Women do seem to approach work differently. And women tend to regard sex differently. They like to at least like the person." Girls Will Be Girls, or Not. [2]
- Let's run it down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It just could make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, and white women — with men relating to that as best they can. A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant, or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or "coin" as well). Goodbye to all that.
—Robin Morgan, Goodbye to All That, 1970.
- And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism — the lie that there can be such a thing as 'men's liberation groups.' Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a 'threatening' characteristic shared by the latter group — skin color or sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters (racism hurts whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not OPPRESSED. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism — the oppressed have no alternative — for they have no power — but to fight. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men — but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is NOT the fault of women — kill your fathers, not your mothers.
—Robin Morgan, Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, 1974.
- "I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them." -- Robin Morgan,
- Biological determinism has for years struck me as a failure of intellectual nerve. So I don't mean to counter sexist theories along those lines with a mirror-image feminist version. We have as yet no truly value-free science, uninfluenced by masculinist (among other biases) prejudice. Consequently — although on certain bleak days I am sorely tempted to agreement with what we feminists have termed the "acute terminal testosterone-poisoning" theory of patriarchal history — I do not make the argument that women are inherently more peaceable, nurturing, or altruistic than men. (For one thing, this permits men the laziest of justifications for their own behavior.) Yet it is undeniable that history is a record of most women acting peaceably and of most men acting belligerently — to a point where the capacity for belligerence is regarded as an essential ingredient of manhood and the proclivity for conciliation is thought largely a quality of women.
—Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism, 1989.
[edit] External links
- RobinMorgan.us, her official site
- Terrorism, Sexuality and Robin Morgan from EquityFeminism.com
- Patriarchy Breeds Terrorism: A Review of The Demon Lover from Peacework Magazine
- Goodbye To All That (#2) from the Women's Media Center
